Why Hits? Our Pricing System Explained

At amazee.io we are committed to transparency, and that includes pricing transparency. This post will explain why we use site hits as the basis for our pricing and how this method helps you save money.

Traditional Pricing Methods

There are many ways to charge for hosting services. One popular method bases its pricing on a client’s CPU and RAM needs. While this is a convenient method for hosting companies, there are several problems with this approach. The first is, no one really knows how much CPU and RAM it takes to run a Drupal site. This calculation depends on many factors, including a client’s Drupal version, how many modules the site has, how often the cache is cleared, and how many concurrent visitors the site has.

Resource needs for Drupal sites can also vary depending on the number of servers supporting them. A site running on two servers might use one and a half CPUs. But that same site, when given three servers, could then use two CPUs.

The second problem is that if the site’s CPU or RAM goes over the plan allotment, your entire site can stop working. It’s as easy to overshoot your site’s CPU/RAM needs and pay more than is necessary month-to-month as it is to underestimate and be charged exponentially for the overage.

This hope-and-see method isn’t the kind of performance/punishment we want to offer our clients. We knew there had to be a better way, so we started looking into pay-per-use models.

Why Hits?

Amazon uses a pay-per-use model with AWS, which is becoming popular because of its many advantages. For one thing, pricing can be linear, rather than compartmental. Another advantage is that your site traffic can fluctuate up and down, and you can pay only for what you need at any given time.

This works wonderfully for sites that have a “busy season”, with expected heavy site traffic. For example, a non-profit which runs its annual membership campaign every January can expect to see huge traffic spikes during that month. That organization shouldn’t have to pay for server space that they will only be using one month of the year. With a pay-per-use system, they can support their lower traffic months with lower monthly fees and pay more only when needed during their busy month.

Similarly, if your online business is growing, with a pay-per-use system, your hosting needs can scale as you scale. Your space, and your price, can grow along with your traffic and your business. Instead of having to buy a bigger house up front and then grow into it, you can have another room magically appear when your family gets bigger.

Breaking Down Your Monthly Invoice

Your monthly bill from amazee.io consists of two parts: the base fees, which is the same from month to month, and the hits fees which change based on your site traffic.

The base fee includes:

• 1 production site

• 2 development sites

• 5GB of storage

• Unlimited local development sites

You can add additional development sites and additional storage per sites as needed for an additional low fee.

If you have multiple production sites or are an agency reselling our hosting services, our hits-based pricing works in your favor. Rather than calculate the hits of each production site and billing per site, we aggregate the hits of all your production sites and apply the total hits to the appropriate pricing tier.